Musicians Have Always Been Ripped Off - Here’s How to Fix It

[Goodcat49]

The music industry’s business model has always been broken. For over 100 years artists have been paid a fraction of the earnings their music makes.

Take Enrico Caruso, an Italian opera singer from the early 1900’s, credited with being one of the very first recorded artists. Over his lifetime he made over 488 recordings, almost exclusively for Victor, a record label now known as RCA and owned by Sony Music. While it is said that this made Caruso extremely rich, netting him nearly $2 million, his label scooped nearly twice that and is still making money from his recordings today.

Many think the golden age of vinyl and CD’s was a time when artists were fairly compensated, but even then musicians weren’t exactly raking it in. A report suggests that, when records were still popular, of every $1,000 of albums sold, 18% went to the musicians, 63% to the record label, and 24% to distributors. Meaning each artist got a grand total of $23.40.

Then along came the Internet.

Times They Are A-Changin’
According to The Economist, back in 1997 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was looking for online retail opportunities. He considered selling music but quickly realised there were only a few major music labels, and they would have the power to stifle any online venture that presented serious competition.

The first online music sharing service, Napster, bypassed the record labels altogether and facilitated free peer-to-peer sharing of compressed music files. Obviously, that didn’t work out for them, and it wasn’t long before Napster found itself facing litigation from all angles. The company was closed by court order in 2001, after less than three years of operation. The Napster brand only survived because the company's assets were liquidated and purchased by other companies through bankruptcy proceedings.

Free Money
So what changed to make online streaming services a viable business model for companies like Spotify and Apple Music?

The answer is…. nothing.

Musicians are not earning more now, despite having a new revenue channel. Spotify admits the average per-stream payout to rights holders lands somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084. As this model shows, an artist would need to get 200k plays per month on Apple Music and 230K plays to earn the US minimum wage.

Read the details in the article of Coinidol dot com, the world blockchain news outlet: https://coinidol.com/musicians-have-been-ripped-off/

[btyco]

There are lots of coins out there to help the musicians out. One of the biggest and best right now is VIBERATE which has formed a relationship with ticketmaster already.